


What Happens Now

by Deannie



Series: The Mistake [2]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Magnificent Seven AU: ATF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-08
Updated: 2016-01-08
Packaged: 2018-05-12 14:59:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5670133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He needed to talk to Vin, he knew that. Needed to clear the air. And honestly, Vin needed to know he was leaving before he put in his resignation letter. It wouldn’t fix anything between them, but at least Vin would know what to expect when he came back to work.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Happens Now

**Author's Note:**

> Sequel to [What Happened Then.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5652037)
> 
> NOTE! Please don't read this if sexual assault is triggery for you. This only discusses prior acts and is in no way graphic, but seriously....

It had been another hard, frustrating day in the office and Chris had never been more sure that he was doing the right thing in leaving. He’d gotten another email from the shrink to schedule a follow-up appointment, but he wouldn’t be needing it. You couldn’t get fired for not attending therapy if you quit.

Not that he’d actually written the resignation letter, yet, but… It was the only thing he could think of that could give the rest of his team a chance to survive. He’d have to do it soon.

Ezra hadn’t said more than three words—all one syllable—in the four hours he was there before his own counseling session. He avoided Chris with equal parts anger and some other emotion Chris couldn’t read, and sat at his desk with his broken hands, pecking painfully at his keyboard with a pencil he’d stuck in his splint.

JD was talking a mile a minute about absolutely nothing, as he had been pretty much since Ezra came back to work on Monday. Chris was hoping the kid would eventually work it out on his own, or with Buck’s help.

Not that he could ask Buck about that, though, because Buck was being a regular pain in the ass, as usual. He'd been pushing Chris for more than a week, riding him for not talking to Ezra or talking to Vin or talking to _anybody_ , and today he'd made a pointed reference to how _surely_ Chris had seen Vin at the ranch lately, what with Vin tending Peso’s sore foot.

Buck knew damn well that Chris hadn’t been to his ranch since the day after Ezra got out of the hospital. Chris hadn’t even known Peso _had_ a sore foot, God damn it, so now he was having to drive out to the ranch in the rain and check on the stupid horse. Could have been drinking in his comfy hotel room, hating his life a little more.

The shit of it was that the long drive up the foothills left him way too much time to think.

Hell, at least Nathan and Josiah had kept their mouths shut. If he’d had to hear Nathan’s preaching or Josiah’s… also preaching….

They couldn't say anything he hadn't already said to himself. He should never have gotten involved with Vin the way he had, for a million different reasons, not the least of which was that he was the man’s AiC. That made the relationship a liability from the start, and Chris should have known better than to let it happen.

Should have known better than to do a lot of things…

Well he supposed that problem was dealt with now. He didn’t doubt that, with the right support, Vin could come back from the trauma of what Tarnowski had done to him, but he’d sure as hell never want to share Chris’s bed again. He’d be okay, eventually. Vin had been through a lot of shit in his life, and he’d always come out the other side. A cold, vicious voice in Chris’s mind reminded him of how cavalier Vin had been about the whole thing at the beginning. He’d fucking talked Chris into this in the first place, right? So it served—

God. No. _No._ Nothing in this shit of circumstances served _anyone_ right, and he felt like a monster for having thought those words for even a second.

It was all such a custerfuck. Vin… and Ezra…

He couldn’t help but replay the discussion he and Ezra had had in his office the morning Ezra disappeared. He’d been so damn focused on getting Vin out of Tarnowski’s clutches that he hadn’t bothered to think through what Ezra was actually saying. Standish was an undercover agent—more, he was one of the best men Chris knew at reading people and situations. He’d been trying to warn Chris about pushing Tarnowski too hard. He’d been trying to let Chris know he was putting Ezra’s own life in jeopardy doing it.

But Chris’s brain was so far in his damn pants that instead of figuring out a better way or just letting his God damned agents do their jobs, he’d pulled that bark of his out—the one that he knew Ezra always seemed to respond to—and ordered the man to sacrifice himself for no other reason than Chris couldn’t let his lover be in Tarnowski’s bed any longer.

And Standish had gone. Because he always did. If he had died in that fucking torture pit...

Chris looked around as he reached his driveway and breathed a huge sigh of relief that Vin’s Jeep was nowhere to be seen. He knew himself well enough to know that he wouldn’t have turned tail and run if it had been there, but he sure would have been tempted. Too many poisonous thoughts running through his head right now.

He headed to the house to drop off his bag and unlocked the door silently, turning to the security pad and stopping dead. Well, shit.

`DISARMED — ID 309`

Vin’s code. He must have driven the Jeep around to the stables and parked it there....

Surrendering to the inevitable, Chris walked up to his room and placed the bag on his dresser. He’d been meaning to come up and get new clothes for a couple of days now, but the specter of what was obviously destined to happen tonight had stopped him.

He needed to talk to Vin, he knew that. Needed to clear the air. And honestly, Vin needed to know he was leaving before he put in his resignation letter. It wouldn’t fix anything between them, but at least Vin would know what to expect when he came back to work.

“Chris?” Vin called from downstairs.

God, but he sounded so _normal_. The old anger started a slow boil in Chris’s stomach. Hell, maybe Vin hadn’t cared he was gone after all. Maybe he’d been _glad_ not to have him hovering and smothering and worrying—

“Hoping that’s you, because I’m gonna shoot anyone who isn’t.”

Chris came to the top of the stairs, making sure he was plainly visible. He was disturbed to see a gun actually in Vin’s hand and the sight of it sobered him. Was Vin jumpy like that all the time now?

“What would you have done if it was Buck, picking up the mail or something?” Chris asked, surprised at how normal he sounded himself.

Vin slid the safety on and stowed his sidearm. “Buck’s too lazy to come out here when I’m coming anyway, Chris.” There was a bitterness there that Chris willfully ignored. “I been the one delivering your damn mail.”

Chris didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing, just followed Vin into the kitchen where Vin poured himself a glass of water.

“Peso’s better,” Vin put in. “Thanks for asking.”

“I was going to—“

“You weren’t.” Vin turned to him and lounged against the countertop, favoring his healing side. “You didn’t have to move out, you know. Could’ve just left me a note. ‘Get the fuck off my property.’ Hell, I’m already avoiding the office and the Saloon. What’s one more?”

Chris felt his hackles rise, the slow burn in his belly building. It was his fault, and he knew that, but… “Vin, God damn it—“

“Forget it, Chris. It doesn’t matter.” He drained his cup, putting it in the sink. “I’ll be back to work on Monday. Figure you’re gone by Friday, huh?”

Chris froze. How the hell did Vin know?

“I’m not stupid, Larabee,” Vin muttered quietly, his own anger clearly evident. “You’ve done it before. No reason to believe you won’t do it again.” He shrugged and Chris resisted the urge to hit him, knowing his emotions were running too high to be having this discussion right now. When did this all get so out-of-hand? “Sometimes running is easier than facing up to your mistakes.”

“When your mistakes nearly cost your team their lives—“

“I’m breathing. Ezra’s breathing,” Vin put in. “Maybe a little loco still, but it’s not like you’ve been helping with that, either, have you?”

Chris dropped his chin to his chest, his anger flowing out through a hole in his gut. Vin was right. Chris hadn’t done a damn thing to fix Ezra—hell, to fix anybody.

He took a deep breath and tried to calm himself down. This wasn’t helping anything. “How are you doing?” he offered, trying hard to make it sound like the peace offering it was. Before all this, he’d come to know this man almost as well as he knew himself, but now he had to _ask_ how he was doing...

Vin shrugged. “Bullet’s healing up pretty good. Doc says I won’t be up for long-range shooting for another month, though. Between the concussion and the pressure it puts on my chest….” He tightened up. “The rest’ll heal as it can, I guess.”

 _The rest._ Chris tried not to think about it. What Tarnowski had done to him...

“You did good,” he whispered. He’d never said it before. Didn’t say a lot of things. “Getting all of them out safe. And Ezra...”

Vin shoved past him into the living area as if he’d suffocate with one more minute in that room. With _him_. “Sort of thought that was the job, Larabee.”

“Travis wants to see you. Wants to give you a commendation for your file.” Stupid-ass thing to say but that was pretty much par for the course these days.

Vin snorted. “Just what I need.”

“I read your report to him.” Shit. He hadn’t meant to say that. God, this was going badly.

Vin’s gaze narrowed. “Thought that was just for his eyes.”

“He doesn’t know.”

“You been taking lessons on thieving from Ezra, huh?” There was a thread of amused pride in with the angry hurt there that almost gave Chris hope for a second. “Good reading?”

“Was a hell of a risk going back for them, Vin,” he replied. “What if he’d gotten Ezra to talk?”

“Ezra don’t talk,” Vin barked back. “He’d’ve died before he said a damn word and you should’ve known that.”

Chris did, of course. It was that fucking doggedness of Standish’s that got him into this in the first place. _After you threw him in the pit,_ his conscience replied.

“You ain’t the only one to read what he shouldn’t,” Vin gritted out after a long minute. “Saw your notes on the casino.” He looked up, shame and anger in his eyes. “That really what you think of them? Just a bunch of rent boys, living the high life?”

Chris shook his head in regret. It hadn’t been what he’d meant, but he remembered the sentence: _T’s rent boys in presidential suite—room service?_

It had been a bad day that day, too. Vin had been picked up and delivered by Tarnowski’s man earlier that day, and Chris had been holding his breath and his temper, waiting for word that Vin hadn’t been made or raped or hell, just outright shot on sight. The fact that Ezra had managed to confirm the location of Tarnowski’s harem and that it had been the nicest suite in the hotel had just set something off in him.

“I didn’t mean that, Vin,” he said quietly, raising his hands in apology. “Look, it was a bad fucking day—“

“Bad fucking day, huh?” Vin headed for the liquor shelf and pulled down a bottle of scotch and a glass. It struck Chris forcefully that he had no idea what pain meds and… other drugs… they might have Vin on and whether the younger man should be drinking at all. “No, a bad fucking day is when your john works you over so hard that the money you made turning tricks for the last week all goes to the clinic to patch you up.” Chris tried not to throw up at the nonchalant statement as Vin took a swallow of his scotch and turned on him. “Now that’s a bad _fucking_ day.”

“Vin, I’m sorry—“

“Sorry for what, exactly, Chris?” Vin asked coldly. “Sorry for jumping the gun on Tarnowski? Sorry for setting Ezra up to take the fall? Sorry for sending me in there in the first place?” He turned his back on Chris. “Or sorry that I actually gave enough of a fuck about a bunch of worthless rent boys to risk anything to get them out?”

“Now wait a minute, Vin, that’s not fair!” Chris strode across the room and pulled Vin around to face him, sloshing most of the scotch onto the hardwood floor. “You knew what you were walking into. You said you could handle it!” A crucial filter disengaged in Chris brain. “You told me you could figure out a way to stay out of his bed!”

“What, and you’re cutting me loose because I _couldn’t_?!”

“Damn it, Vin—“

“No, fuck you, Larabee!” Vin shoved him away, stalking to the window and back again. “Who the fuck are you to call me on _my_ shit, here? You have no idea what life was like on the street and you got no idea what it was like in that fucking casino.”

Chris stepped forward, anger rising again. “Well it sure as hell seemed—“

“FUCK ‘SEEMED’!” Vin stood stock still after his shriek. Chris wondered if the man had ever been this mad before. “I don’t give a shit how it seemed. _Seems_ like you’re just running out on us because you can’t face the fact that you made a mistake.” He advanced on Chris. “You gonna just leave Ezra like that? Huh? Shit, nobody’d ever send him out in the field again in his state and if they did, he’d bite it his first assignment.”

“Vin—“

“You _shut up_ ‘til I’ve had my piece, Larabee,” Vin growled. “God damn.”

He paced the room like a caged tiger, the hitch in his step from his still-healing injuries making him look more dangerous instead of less.

“Whoring ain’t something these boys do ‘cause they want to—I don’t care who tells you it is. Don’t care how much a kid like Matty might say he enjoys his sex and his cushy hotel room and his fancy clothes. He was on the street at twelve, just like me, so don’t you _dare_ try to judge him. Or me, either.”

He stopped and looked out into the rain. “I done my job, Chris,” he finally murmured quietly. “Jesus, all I done was my job and it was dirty and it hurt and I come back and you’re fucking gone.” His chin hit his chest and he sighed in frustration. “You were all I thought about in there. What got me through the shit of it.” He looked up, piercing Chris with agonized blue eyes. “And then you leave me high and dry. What’s that?”

Chris found it difficult to move. To breathe. He’d known with a pain like fire that he’d abandoned Ezra to his fate—he had to live with that. But to know that Vin thought the same…?

“Vin, I—“ No. Vin had spilled his guts. He deserved better than rationalizations. “I can’t help but choose you. Don’t you see? Ezra’s where he is because I _chose_ to put him there instead of wait it out. Because I couldn’t stand _you_ in there one second more than you had to be.”

“Because you were jealous?” Vin grated almost silently. Nonsensical and designed to hurt, the phrase lanced through Chris’s brain.

“What? No… Fuck…” He took a deep breath. “Vin, I hate that this assignment was what it was. We’re not supposed to have to do that— _you’re_ not supposed to. And… God, I hate that you were so fucking casual about it.”

“Casual.” Vin seemed to roll the word around in his mouth. “Weren’t nothing casual about that, Cowboy.” He looked up and Chris’s heart seemed to break all over again at the blankness in his gaze. “He liked to hurt, Chris. We knew that. He wanted it to hurt, beginning, middle, and end. Every time.” One hand started massaging the other. “I couldn’t watch it anymore.”

Chris fell into the couch behind him, missing the guilt and disgust that swamped Vin’s features as the realization of exactly _why_ Vin finally found his way into Tarnowski’s bed struck him. To save the kids from that monster without blowing the case. “Vin…”

“I gotta go,” Vin said quietly, words edged in resignation. “Told Buck I’d check in on Ezra tonight. He had one of those sessions with Dr. Tilman and he’s never quite right in the head after.” He sighed at Chris’s silence and headed for the door.

“Vin, don’t.”

Two words. Two words, but so damn much said between them.

Vin turned and Chris padded up to him and stood just that bit not-close-enough. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Jesus, I’m sorry for everything. I wish we’d never...”

Vin closed his eyes for a moment and swallowed hard. “Yeah, I know you do. I don’t. And I won’t offer to leave, Larabee,” he said quietly. “You can have me transferred if you like—wouldn’t be the first time I was kicked out—but I won’t go willingly.”

Chris’s hand curled into a painful fist. “I can’t make a mistake like this again, Vin. And if you stay here…”

Vin snorted, like he expected nothing more of Chris. “Of course. Guess I’ll start packing—“

Chris grabbed for him as Vin turned away, and the younger man spun on him, ready to strike. Vin backed off immediately with a look of shame and shock on his face. “Fuck, Chris—“ he tried to apologize.

“ _If. You. Stay here,_ ” Chris continued, keeping his distance now in the face of Vin’s traumatic reaction. “It’s your job to see that I don’t.”

Vin processed that for a minute before a small, hesitant smile broke out. “I reckon I can do that.”

“And don’t you ever talk me into a shit assignment like that again.” Chris tried to match the smile, but it was too soon. Hurt too much.

Vin laughed weakly at it, though, and Chris could almost see a light at the end of this God forsaken tunnel. At least it seemed a little less black. “Don’t worry, Cowboy,” he promised. “I’ve had my fill of undercover work for a while.”

“Speaking of,” Chris said, shaking himself and trying to accept that the world wasn’t actually coming to an end right now. “Don’t you have a date with a certain undercover agent?”

“I don’t think Ezra’d see it as a date, Chris,” Vin said lightly. “I’m pretty sure I don’t want him to, either.”

Chris nodded and steeled himself to say what he knew he had to. “I could tag along. Maybe.” He gestured to the half-drunk glass of scotch. “Figuring you shouldn’t drive while you’re drinking.”

The edges of Vin’s mouth turned up just that tiniest bit. “Ain’t the drink that’d do it, Cowboy,” he said, heading for the door at a pace that showed how much of a toll his tirade had taken on his healing body. “Figure the oxycodone’s a bigger risk.”

Chris’s stomach dropped as he watched his friend struggle into his coat. “Jesus, Vin, _tell me_ you didn’t just mix alcohol and opiates.”

Vin looked back at him with a smile that put his stomach back where it was supposed to be and caused another part of his anatomy to respond instead. “Larabee, you are so damn gullible.”

Maybe he was, he thought as Vin walked out the door and he moved to follow him. Gullible enough to believe they might make it through this as the team of seven they started with.

If he could just get Ezra to listen to him...

* * * * *  
the end


End file.
